Postcards from Travel Near and Far by Jia-Rui

94109, San Francisco

Geoff suggested we go to dinner at a Vietnamese place called Pagolac in the Tenderloin. He took me on a particularly seedy walk to get there, but maybe that was part of the experience. Steven and I shared the specialty, 7 Flavors of Beef. Even though I’m not into raw meat, I thought the first course carpaccio was quite delicious. I pigged out on the next two courses, which required cooking thin slices of beef at the table (first in an onion broth, second on a cone-shaped grill). We rolled them into softened rice paper with lettuce, coriander, mint and assorted vegetables. I was full by the time the skewers and sausages showed up. But stomach space finally cleared and I gobbled down the last bowl of deep, savory beef porridge. (Why can I only account for six kinds of beef?) As we talked about advertising and newspapers, Geoff and Steven marveled at how the timbre of my voice cut through the background noise. I told them Bryan, ever the music engineer, likes to say that I have a lot of 3 kilohertz in my voice. That’s apparently the frequency that human ears are most sensitive to.

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I'm a journalist based in Los Angeles who has always said that writing postcards for a living would be a dream job. The posts -- short enough to fit on an actual postcard -- chronicle recent travels near and far. I could blab on about being inspired by epistolary novels, the short poems of Emily Dickinson, and the New Yorker's "Talk of the Town" pieces, but I'll just say that I'm aiming to give you a sense of flavor of a place without boring you to death. Wish you were here!